Chronicle of a Fateful Night: Fruitvale Station Is a Dazzling Achievement

In the first hours of New Year’s Day in 2009, a young black man returning home was taken off a BART train by police and leaned against the platform wall of Fruitvale station in Oakland. Officers had answered a call about a fight on board; it was 2:00 a.m., and the train was filled with boisterous New Year’s revelers. Against the wall, the young man, who was with some friends, may have talked back. The officers punched him down into submission; later, in full sight of all the other passengers, some of whom had begun shooting video, the police kneed the man in the neck or face. At one point, the man had his flip phone to his ear, as if trying to make a call. The officers went on to try to cuff him and his friends. When he seemed to be resisting—he had served two prison terms for felonies and had lately been doing quite well on his parole—the police wrestled him to the ground. During the struggle, one of the officers rose suddenly, stood over him, unholstered a pistol, and shot him in the back. He was 22. He was unarmed. He had a daughter who was four years old. His name was Oscar Grant III.

The New Year’s incident on BART—a case of racially charged police brutality in a time, and place, that should have left such rank specters behind—became a touchstone in the twenty-first-century Bay Area, and it’s the subject of writer-director Ryan Coogler’s stunning debut feature, Fruitvale Station. Working from public-record documents, with the cooperation of Grant’s family, Coogler films a portrait of the man’s last 24 hours so delicate and assured, so sharply tuned to the nuances of his world and his own contradictions, that despite its dark terminus, it’s a movie filled with energy and life. This is a dazzling achievement. Fruitvale Station is that rare report on cruel disaster that is pitched just right: attending to the intricacies of the lives involved while giving the entire subject a broadly stirring, almost classically tragic, hue.

The Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) whom we meet as the movie opens is a good guy who has made bad choices. Raised in Hayward, a residential city on the southern flank of the East Bay, he now lives with his long-term girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz), and his preschool-age daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal). After getting out of San Quentin, for dealing marijuana, he is trying to make amends with his family. He isn’t doing so well. Oscar had an encounter with another woman. He’s also lost his job at the butcher counter of a local supermarket, where he was the friendly employee in residence. (When a flustered young white woman (Ahna O’Reilly), comes in one day, determined to make Southern-fried fish for her boyfriend but totally flummoxed by the details, Oscar puts her on the line with his Grandma Bonnie (Marjorie Shears).) He’s desperate to make his rent; he sets up a drug deal, but, worried about his daughter, ends up tossing his entire stock of marijuana into the bay. He tries to be an attentive family man despite his financial constraints, lending money to his sister and arranging a dinner for his mother (Octavia Spencer, in finest form), whose birthday is on New Year’s Eve. When he talks about going into San Francisco with Sophina and some friends to see the fireworks—he’s looking for a low-key night—his mother tells him to avoid the traffic on the bridge. “Why don’t you take the train out there?” she asks. This sets the wheels of his tragic fate into motion.

The story of Oscar Grant could have no better interpreter than Coogler, who grew up in the East Bay and knows the place, the rhythms of its life, the language so well that the film, shot locally, shimmers with intimacy. (It also feels oddly timely, too, with this summer’s BART strike so much in the news.) The Grant we meet here is doomed equally by his own decisions and the pressures of his environment: He has made wrong turns, but he’s never given the chance that his good faith merits. Jordan is a wizard at conjuring these multitudes, showing us a Grant who is at once smooth, desperate, unreliable, and morally responsible to those around him. Though the film occasionally leans toward a martyr’s hagiography—in one scene, Oscar undertakes a laying-on of hands with a dying dog—the character’s complexity never loses its place at the fore.

A movie with such distinct social purpose has two risks. One is speaking narrowly from its subject’s vantage, to the point of inaccessibility. The other is to serve as a valve for social guilt, allowing its viewers (probably largely white and unbeset by troubles such as Grant’s) to feel duly appalled, and then go off to dinner. Fruitvale Station makes neither error. By expressing Grant’s fate as a matter of simple predestination, rather than specific offense, it raises old questions that are haunting in our era of supposed justice: What force sentenced this good man to a bad death—and, in an age of second chances, why?